Why I love Virginia Woolf

I have been planning this post for months and am super excited to finally write it. Why? Virginia Woolf is one of my all-time favourite authors, whose literary ideas have shaped the work of thousands of authors, both male and female.

As a modernist she experimented with different forms of writing, challenging the status quo, giving birth to techniques that we take for granted now, such as narrating from multiple perspectives reflecting human psychology, monologues and ‘stream of consciousness’. Woolf’s writing took place during the First World War, at a time when society was reasserting traditional values and her work was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.

A member of the Bloomsbury Group (a Group of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who all worked or lived in close proximity to Bloomsbury, London whose work has had significant and long-lasting influence on literature, aesthetics, economics, women’s empowerment and sexuality) Woolf has written about 30 different texts with her most prolific being Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.

The latter is my favourite. This work is actually an essay as opposed to a fictional novel (which the majority of Woolf’s books are categorised as). This was based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge and it was a revolutionary piece of work, given the time (1928), calling for women’s rights, intellectual freedom and financial independence. For me personally I love Woolf’s ideas in the essay that point out the…